Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Mental illness is a
serious, grave topic. Yet, if you are a person with a mental illness, it
is a prerogative, a right, and a survival mechanism to find the humor in
your condition.In Monkey Mind, Daniel Smith lays out, in painfully vivid yet highly
hilarious detail, his experience as a person who has an anxiety disorder. He tells the reader at the beginning of
Chapter 2.,

“This
is no recovery memoir, let me warn you now.”

Smith
bravely and deftly explores his own life, and examines the genetic,
psychological and environmental components of his anxiety disorder. As far as the genetic factor, Smith merely
has to look only as far as his mother Marilyn, who has panic disorder. As defined by the National Institute of
Mental Health (NIMH), panic disorder is
“an anxiety disorder and is characterized by unexpected and repeated episodes
of intense fear accompanied by physical symptoms which are called panic
attacks. “Panic attacks are characterized by a fear of disaster or of losing control
even when there is no real danger.” In Smith’s
words,

“…what do you do if your greatest fear is of being
afraid?”

Without revealing the
confluence of events which led Smith’s mother Marilyn to learn to live with and
to accept her panic disorder, I can say
that she chose, of all professions, to become a therapist. Was it a comfort for a boy with anxiety to
have a mother who was a therapist? Eh,
not so much.

Smith probes deep into his
childhood to find “the” event to get to the origin of his anxiety. Certainly there are, as he says, “clues,” but
even knowing about these psychologically and environmentally impacting issues cannot
prevent his anxiety. At 16, he loses his virginity in such a way
as would traumatize any young person. He
spends the rest of high school in utter distress, and Marilyn and his father
decide that Smith needs medication and therapy.
These are like a small gauze pad on a gunshot wound to the abdomen. Anxiety is like the monster in any horror
film which keeps rising from the dead, no matter how many ways and times you
kill it.

Smith’s memoir continues
through his college years, and his first job as a “fact-checker at a major
American magazine.” These
second and third “Episodes” of Smith’s book are equally fascinating and
riveting because Daniel Smith, truly, is a brilliant writer. He cites Søren
Kierkegaard, who wrote The Concept of
Anxiety in 1844); Franz Kafka, who had a deep-seated fear of appearing
physically and mentally repulsive, i.e. social anxiety); and Philip Roth, who, like Smith, uses his
middle-class secular Jewish upbringing as a well for self-loathing and
irreverent humor.

Anxiety
is not usually a funny subject, but I guffawed and laughed and giggled all the
way through Monkey Mind. Smith seamlessly intertwines serious and incredible critical analysis of his own
anxiety disorder, and anxiety in general, with side-splitting humor. Smith has great intelligence, great heart,
and, although I don’t wish to worry him, a great future ahead of him as a book
writer.